“You have all the funds that were meant to hold a bigger party than you’ll have now,” Jicks pointed out. “Abi knows how to drive and cook now, you can sell the second wagon and tie the hinny to the tail of the first.”

“I’d rather give you the wagon,” decreed Master Vance. “You can get a mule or a horse here, and it’ll make transporting your tame Mage a lot easier. You might as well take the supplies we won’t need, too. Think of it as a bonus for your work.”

Jicks smiled, clearly pleased. “A pleasure doing business with you, Master. I’ll make sure to let everyone know how Valdemarans are.”

The last was said with a knowing look at Abi. She’s remembered to tell Steen about what’s going to happen if the Border moves. Good.

The people of Elliston gave them all one final feast, with a whole roast lamb all to themselves, and in the morning, they parted on the road, one party going north, and one south.

Abi was relieved to see them vanish into the distance. She’d learned a lot on this trip, but too much of it had been things she wished she could forget.

Still. I’ll be back in time to see my bridge built.

EPILOGUE

Two huge wooden cranes the size of siege engines carefully lowered the last slab of the roadbed into place. The cranes stood on the two sides of completed roadbed on either side of the limestone expanse. The main arch and the subarches had been completed long before Abi had gotten home, but she was in good time to see the last stage, the roadbed itself, set into place. It, too, was an arch, a fragment of a circle rising over the river in so gentle a curve that the eye scarcely noticed what it was.

A crowd of people surrounded her, although she stood a little apart from them, in the company of all of the Artificers and workmen who had labored to bring this limestone dream to reality—in fact, crowds waited breathlessly on both sides of the bridge, here for the sole purpose of seeing it completed.

Beneath the stone, the wooden supporting structure was still in place, but once the initial keystone of the arch had been set, and the iron dovetails were in place, the bridge had been supporting itself.

Eight workmen guided the slab until it was directly over the gap. Then the crane crews cranked on their apparatus until the stone hovered within a breath of the surface.

Then the workmen slipped a dozen wedges of highly flammable pitch-pine into the gap between the slab and the roadbed. The crews cranked again, and the slab lowered to almost fill the gap. The workmen removed the two rope cradles. Supported by the two dozen wooden wedges, the surface of the slab stood about a thumb’s-breadth above the roadbed surface.